Heartbreak is the worst. Heartbreak is dying inside as you keep being pressured to thrive in life. Heartbreak is crying every night alone but greeting everyone with a smile on your face every morning. Heartbreak is telling everyone you’re fine but you’re really on the verge of depression. You need all the help in the world. Heartbreak is trying to be open and optimistic about love, but the truth is you don’t trust anyone anymore, you don’t even trust yourself, your choices or your feelings.

Heartbreak makes you feel entitled to act like an asshole because you’ve been hurt and people should unequivocally understand that.

It makes you guarded, closed off, stand-offish and distant because the last time you got close to someone, they broke your heart.

It makes you cruel to that person because they weren’t kind to you.

It makes you bitter, cynical, angry and resentful but you justify this behavior because who wouldn’t be that way after what you’ve seen, after what you’ve been through, after it took you months or years to move on.

It makes you believe that you’re entitled to treat everyone you meet with caution because the last time you truly trusted someone, they betrayed you.

It makes you afraid of fully living and opening your heart because you never thought you’d move on from your heartbreak and when you finally did, you promised yourself never to feel that way again. You promised yourself to stay away from heartbreak because you can’t afford another one.

But when you stay away from heartbreak, you stay away from love.

When you stop giving and loving like you did before you got hurt, you stop enjoying the most beautiful things in life. You stop living.

But I get it. I’m still struggling with it. They say that as long as you do everything in moderation, you have nothing to worry about.

But if you want the passionate, all-in and unreserved love, how do you expect to find it if you can’t give it your all? How do you expect to find it if you’re going to do it ‘moderation?’

Because love is one of the few things in life that can’t be in moderation, you either love someone too much or you’re settling. You either love them enough to give them a part of your heart knowing that they can easily break it or you don’t love them enough so you keep your heart to yourself.

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.